Stop forcing announcements on users, and stop abusing them

SquareWheel wrote:

Agreed, glad to hear feedback.  So will this "Opt out of Announcements" button actually disable the spam?  I'd like to be alerted of updates to the software itself, but none of the "Come vote for us at ..." crap.

There is no button yet, we are planning enhancements to this announcement system, but weren't prepared to do so until we were done upgrading our servers.  That's not done yet.

chris wrote:

There is no button yet, we are planning enhancements to this announcement system, but weren't prepared to do so until we were done upgrading our servers.  That's not done yet.

Oh I'm sorry, I must have misread eltoddo's post.  Obviously these announcements aren't something that you have to include with the program, so I don't think it's fair to say that you need to upgrade the servers before you can look into this: you can just not include the spam announcements at all and work on an opt-in function at a later point.

Don't get me wrong, I really do appreciate the developer feedback, but I disagree in that there's nothing you can do about it now.

Yes you must drop everything else you are working so hard on just to satisfy the few impatient people who are incapable of just ignoring the very very very rare messages that dotSyntax sends to all Digsby users.

Wonder if they are like this with everything they get for free.

I also registered to mention that the announcement pop-ups are quite annoying. If I am running a task, and a background pop-up comes in, sometimes it loses focus on the main task that I am working on. It can be frustrating when something like this happens when I don't expect it to.

Carbonize, they choose when to send out announcements, so how much effort do you think it takes them to NOT send out an announcement?  Not very much, is my guess.  In fact, I'm pretty sure if they did absolutely nothing at all that those "few impatient people" would be satisfied.

Here's the latest of the "very very very rare" messages:

-- Digsby Announcement --
digsby.org -- 6:03 PM

Calling all designers! Our twitter account could use a new background so we're holding a contest with lots of prizes! Do you have the skills to win? More details on our blog:

http://blog.digsby.com/archives/1033

Good luck!




I gotta say, if this message showed up in my mail inbox it would be marked as spam injudiciously.

Maybe that's what digsby needs: a way to mark any message from a source (official or otherwise) with a flag saying "Never show me messages from this source again." That would really help with those annoying AOL System Messages telling me I'm logged in in multiple locations constantly when I use my phone's IM client.

By the way, Carbonize, "very rare" is completely subjective. Maybe you're getting thousands of messages a day and that odd message doesn't really bother you. But the fact is it bothers others. God forbid someone have a differing opinion from yours. And for your reference, not that you care, I wouldn't consider an IM message "very rare" if I get it more than once a year; sort of like it's "very rare" that the power goes out. I'm not sure how you would react when your utility provider tells you that power failures are very rare, yet you have one about once a week.

I'm OK with dealing with it for now, but I'm going to make sure my voice is heard that I'm not happy about it. That's how things change.

When I say the messages from Disgby are very rare I mean the messages from Digsby are very rare not that I get thousands of messages a day so the Digsby messages are irrelvant. The last message I received before this rather pointless Twitter one was to inform me about a new alpha build and that was about 10 days ago.

And as Chris has already said, "we [dotSyntax] are planning enhancements to this announcement system, but weren't prepared to do so until we were done upgrading our servers.  That's not done yet."

carbonize wrote:

And as Chris has already said, "we [dotSyntax] are planning enhancements to this announcement system, but weren't prepared to do so until we were done upgrading our servers.  That's not done yet."

still not done.  we've upgraded the outward facing xmpp machines, which is what really matters for the announce system, but we've still got database servers to upgrade and webservers to reallocate/reconfigure.  Once that's all done, it basically unifies our server setup into something completely cluster-based (read: extremely fault-tolerant) which means we can actually afford to take down a server or two without it being a big deal.  VM's only go so far.

Don't rush on my account. I'd sooner you had a stable set up than rush things just to appease the impatient few.

BTW going off your post are you saying the announcements are sent using Jabber protocol and if so is it the same method used for the widgets?

carbonize wrote:

BTW going off your post are you saying the announcements are sent using Jabber protocol and if so is it the same method used for the widgets?

both use <message> stanzas, if that answers your question.

Was just curious if the Widget used the Jabber protocol and if so could people use your @digsby.com address to contact you via jabber

carbonize wrote:

Was just curious if the Widget used the Jabber protocol and if so could people use your @digsby.com address to contact you via jabber

1) the xmmp server runs as digsby.org
2) not federated.

This one I understand why it seemed important, but was it really?

-- Digsby Announcement --
digsby.org -- 11:25 PM

There was a protocol change in Facebook Chat which is causing the buddy list to not load. We will patch this up in the morning and push out an auto-update.

Thanks for reporting the issue!




If I may give some constructive feedback: maybe instead of pushing messages in a separate pop-up window, some sort of icon that shows up in the buddy list window (possibly where I see the current login status of the service) with a yellow/red status for any Facebook users. Hovering over or clicking on the icon might tell me that in order to get my buddy list to load I need to restart my digsby client to receive a new patch. Or assuming the software architecture is properly modularized, an update to the facebook module might even be pushed and reloaded on the fly when the user opts to do so.

I know I'm not the only one bothered by these messages, so I guess I'll be their voice for now. Be frustrated with me for being impatient if you want, I'm not convinced that the issue at hand is being addressed:

"There is no button yet, we are planning enhancements to this announcement system, but weren't prepared to do so until we were done upgrading our servers.  That's not done yet."

This tells me that the messages are going to be handled by the system differently in the future. For all I know, this just means that Twitter users will get their annoying messages, and facebook users will get theirs, and so on... Forgive me Chris if you were trying to say there is an announcement opt-in(out) feature planned, but until that's confirmed, I'm left trying to interpret these words.


Let me be more pointed. Will digsby allow me to opt out of all announcements in the future?

Update: Second notification of the same update. To be fair, I'm OK with this one. But it's still a pop-up that came up while I was trying to get stuff done.

-- Digsby Announcement --

digsby.org -- 5:59 PM
We just pushed out an update fixing the Facebook login issue which was caused by a protocol change. If you were having trouble, restart Digsby to get the latest update.

Last edited by eltoddo (2009-11-04 21:30:24)

Well said eltoddo.  I wholeheartedly agree.

"Digsby is free
Digsby doesn't use my PC for crap unless I tell it to.
Can't remember last time I received a Digsby announcement that was for anything other than informaing me of a new version."

I agree with the above....

The pop-up messages are very few and what is the big deal...don't you have anything more important to do!!

Digsby is a big help ...great programme !!

Dick Dekker

Last edited by dickdekker (2009-11-06 17:13:20)

Don't I anything more important to do?

So your best retort is to point out that a guy who is obviously not English makes grammar mistakes when posting in English? That really is pathetic.

I didn't mean to come off as offensive, and for that I apologize, but you fella are coming off as just as if not more offensive.

eltoddo wrote:

This tells me that the messages are going to be handled by the system differently in the future. For all I know, this just means that Twitter users will get their annoying messages, and facebook users will get theirs, and so on...

^ what it was supposed to do now, but hadn't been used because of a bug.

eltoddo wrote:

Forgive me Chris if you were trying to say there is an announcement opt-in(out) feature planned, but until that's confirmed, I'm left trying to interpret these words.

Let me be more pointed. Will digsby allow me to opt out of all announcements in the future?

That's what I meant by planned, but I have no details to give you.

@ Carbonize and SquareWheel: Lets keep this a civilized discussion. I never wanted this to turn into a flame-war. Lets not make this personal.

@ chris: thanks for the info. Your honest feedback is well received.

@ dickdekker: Some people aren't bothered. We're all different. Some of my friends in the office think I'm nuts for taking this on like some crusade. But it's something I feel strongly about. If you have a different assessment of the situation, I respect that. However I haven't heard one good argument other than "what do you want for free" which I already countered in a previous post.

So that all aside, here's today's message...

-- Digsby Announcement --
digsby.org -- 12:29 PM
- Does Digsby crash for you at least once a week?
- Do you have Visual Studio installed?

If the answer to both questions is yes, then you can help us fix crashes! More details on our blog:

http://blog.digsby.com/archives/1085

Thank you for helping make Digsby better!


Alright, despite being relevant to me, there's absolutely no reason why this should have come across as an IM. Digsby has my email address from when I signed up for the service. This would have been an appropriate email correspondence, not IM. I'm wagering that the vast majority of digsby users are 1) Not serious enough developers to be able to debug someone else's program and 2) Don't have visual studio installed.

On the subject of these messages being sent as emails instead: has this even been considered an alternative to system messages? I know digsby is a messaging platform and it makes logical sense to leverage that platform for the gain of the organization, but who is making such a business decision? I develop voice over IP communications solutions, but we don't put back-doors into our applications to allow solicitation to our customers; we use email for that, which is common, accepted business practice. I don't feel this behavior is appropriate for any other vendor, whether or not the product is free.

Last edited by eltoddo (2009-11-06 16:04:27)